Notes to: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Giorgio Agamben
Chapters:
3.Potentiality and Law
4.Form of Law
Threshold
POTENTIALITY AND LAW.
WIKIPEDIA: The concept of potentiality, in this context, generally refers to any “possibility” that a thing can be said to have. Aristotle did not consider all possibilities the same, and emphasized the importance of those that become real of their own accord when conditions are right and nothing stops them. Actuality, in contrast to potentiality, is the motion, change or activity that represents an exercise or fulfillment of a possibility, when a possibility becomes real in the fullest sense. Aristotle describes potentiality and actuality, or potency and action, as one of several distinctions between things that exist or do not exist. In a sense, a thing that exists potentially does not exist, but the potential does exist. And this type of distinction is expressed for several different types of being within Aristotle’s categories of being.
TEXT:
- Constituted power exist only in the State.
- Constituting power, on the other hand, is situated outside the State
- Benjamin presented the relation between constituting power and constituted power as the relation between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it.
- if constituting power is, as the violence that posits law, certainly more noble than the violence that preserves it, constituting power still possesses no title that might legitimate something other than law-preserving violence and even maintains an ambiguous and ineradicable relation with constituted power.
- Schmitt considers constituting power as a “political will” capable of “making the concrete, fundamental decision on the nature and form of one’s own political existence.”Constituting power stands “before and above every constitutional legislative procedure”.
- Antonio Negri:constituting power is the act of choice, the punctual determination that opens a horizon, the radical enacting of something that did not exist before and whose conditions of existence stipulate that the creative act cannot lose its characteristics in creating.
- The relation between constituting power and constituted power is as the relation Aristotle establishes between potentiality and actuality, dynamis and energeia;the autonomous existence of potentiality – the fact that the kithara player keeps his ability [potenza] to play even when he does not play. Aristotle:“A thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing im-potential”. What is potential can pass over into actuality only at the point at which it sets aside its own potential not to be fits adynamia.
- ( “Actuality” comes from Latin actualitas and is a traditional translation, but its normal meaning in Latin is “anything which is currently happening”)
- an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself.
- Sovereignty is always double because Being, as potentiality, suspends itself in a relation of ban (or abandonment).
- a principle of potentiality is inherent in every definition of sovereignty.
FORM OF LAW
“Everyone strives to attain the Law,” answers the man, “how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?” The doorkeeper . . . bellows in his ear: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.” Kafka. Before the law
- “Before the Law,” Kafka. He presents the pure form in which law affirms itself with the greatest force precisely at the point in which it no longer prescribes anything – which is to say, as pure ban.
“Kafka’s parable about the law describes the way that we experience and understand law and justice even as it also playfully subverts our expectations. Insofar as the parable demonstrates both the immanence of Law and its nonarrival, it suggests that the nature of waiting in this case may not be what we think it is. Kafka’s parable invites us to think about what the law (in its ordinary “small l” sense) is when it is not connected to the Law, when it is experienced only in its banal ordinariness, its day-to-day mediocrity. What if, Kafka seems to be asking us, there were nothing behind that gate? Or perhaps more accurately, what if we knew that we were never going to get through it (something the man from the country finds out only at the very end of his life, when it is too late)? Would that change our relationship to law and to our idea of justice? Would it alter the quality of our political obedience? Would it change the nature or even the fact of our waiting?” source:http://arcade.stanford.edu/journals/rofl/articles/waiting-justice-benjamin-and-derrida-on-sovereignty-and-immanence-by-james-
- What, after all, is the structure of the sovereign ban if not that of a law that is in force but does not signify?
- All societies and all cultures today have entered into a legitimation crisis in which law (we mean by this term the entire text of tradition in its regulative form, whether the Jewish Torah or the Islamic Shariah, Christian dogma or the profane nomos) is in force as the pure “Nothing of Revelation.”
- “form of law”.http://www.oycf.org/Perspectives2/5_043000/what_is_rule_of_law.htm
- To abandon is to remit, entrust, or turn over to … a sovereign power, and to remit, entrust, or turn over to its ban, that is, to its proclaiming, to its convening, and to its sentencing. One always abandons to a law. Abandonment respects the law
- A pure form of law is only the empty form of relation. Yet the empty form of relation is no longer a law but a zone of indistinguishability between law and life, which is to say, a state of exception.
THRESHOLD
Derrida
There are two violences, two competing Gewalten: on the one side, decision (just, historical, political, and so on), justice beyond droit and the state, but without decidable knowledge [i.e., the “Jewish” divine violence]; on the other, decidable knowledge and certainty in a realm that structurally remains that of the undecidable, of the mythic droit of the state [Greek, mythic]. On the one side [Jewish] the decision without undecidable certainty, on the other [Greek] the certainty of the undecidable but without decision. (56)
Divine violence
- For Benjamin, the key difference is that mythological violence is a projection of fantasy by human beings while divine violence serves to undermine that fantasy.
- The root of the ambiguity of divine violence is perhaps to be sought in precisely this absence.
- The violence that Benjamin defines as divine is instead situated in a zone in which it is no longer possible to distinguish between exception and rule.
- link between violence and law (Bare life)
Sovereign violence
- opens a zone of indistinction between law and nature, outside and inside, violence and law.
- the state of actual exception.
Decisive as it is for the origin of Western politics, the opposition between zoē and bios, between zen and eu zēn (that is, between life in general and the qualified way of life proper to men), contains nothing to make one assign a privilege or a sacredness to life as such.
Both Benjamin and Schmitt, if differently, point to life as the element that, in the exception, finds itself in the most intimate relation with sovereignty.